This quick sketch of a day in the life of a young mother of four in working class Dartford, Scotland is a short film which is a fine work of art that stands on its own (and won an Oscar).
The opening sets the pace: Zoe (Natalie Press), a young woman in a nightie, marches down the steps of her council flat leading her three fully dressed little girls aged roughly eight, six and four up the street, herself uncombed and barefoot with a bare-bottomed baby boy under her arm.
Zoe arrives at the door of another council flat, hands the baby to her eldest, Kelly (Jodie Mitchell), theatrically rings the bell, then gets in a shouting, hair-pulling scuffle in the grass outside the flat with the woman who answers the door—her adversary ‘Bullet Head’ (Lizzie Colbert)—because Bullet Head allegedly struck one of Zoe’s daughters.
In her tactical withdrawal after a proper telling off, Zoe and her three small daughters flip off the woman and her family in a synchronized motion ‘on three’ (for those who have seen The Fighter, this film would work marvelously as a prequel, with the Mark Wahlberg character as the baby in this one). On the way back to the flat, Zoe runs into Dave (Danny Dyer), an old boyfriend, who asks her what she’s ‘doin’ with all those kids’—‘Looking after them for a mate,’ she says—and wants to take her out that night.
This gets our story rolling.
Okay, the working class is different—it still has the same culture and characters, even though it’s not really ‘working’ in any proper sense any more. What makes this film so good is that writer and director Andrea Arnold gives you what you think you see and then shows you a lot of things you don’t have any idea about and can’t possibly see or have known without knowing these people as individuals—whether Zoe or her ex-boyfriend Dave, eight-year-old Kelly or her little siblings.
Arnold accomplishes this feat in less than half an hour almost entirely in images conceived from a rich palette of mostly unspoken communications that she shows us in the looks and gestures between a woman not much older than her kids and those kids, as well as between Zoe and other adults, and among the kids themselves.
There is a ‘soundtrack’ of ambient pop tunes—Zoe singing and dancing with her kids, the kids singing and playing alone, and in the background at a pub. Though the emotional content of Arnold’s images woven together does the job that soundtracks try to do—and often don’t succeed nearly half as well in accomplishing—in most feature films.
No wonder it took the best short film Oscar in 2005 and stacks of other festival awards.
This movie is included with Arnold’s feature Red Road.
No comments:
Post a Comment